“Let’s go to the chapel,” I burst out to Davy Lyndsay and my son. “For God’s sake, let us go and pray that this stops.” The two of them, their faces bleached, turn with me. We almost run down the steps of the walls, push past men who are aiming the cannons down the approaches from the town in case the Douglas men come up here, for us, and we fall through the tiny doorway to Saint Margaret’s Chapel and the three of us kneel, shoulder to shoulder, before the little altar.
At once, the peace of the chapel envelops us. Distantly, outside, we can hear the sound of gunfire and screams, we can hear the sound of the fortress readying itself for attack. I put my hands together and realize that I don’t know what to pray for. Outside, my husband, my former helpmeet, my lover and the father of my daughter, is fighting against the only hope for Scotland, my friend and my ally James Hamilton. A thousand of their followers are running up and down the narrow alleys, bursting out of doorways, fighting like cornered rats to get out of the traps of the dark courtyards. They have brought hand-to-hand warfare into the streets of Edinburgh; the disorder of the borders has come into the heart of the capital. This is the end of Scotland, this is the end of my hopes, this is the end of peace.
“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. Pray for us,” I add. “Pray for us.”
My son raises his bowed head and looks up at me. “He’s coming, isn’t he?” he asks simply. “Archibald Douglas, your husband. When he has killed everyone out there, he will come for us.”
The fighting goes on most of the day, but James and I stay inside the little chapel praying for peace. In the afternoon the captain of the guard comes to report, and I tell him to kneel beside me and tell me the news, as if the holy silence will soften the horror of his words.
“The Red Douglases have taken the city,” he says. “There are nearly a hundred dead in the streets. They are clearing the bodies from the causeway with the plague carts. It’s been a war out there while we have locked ourselves in here and done nothing.”
“You had to defend the castle and the king,” I insist.
“But the deputy regent, James Hamilton, was nearly killed,” he says. “We didn’t defend him. We didn’t defend the king’s peace.”
“James Hamilton has escaped?”
“He got away on a coalman’s packhorse,” the captain says tightly. “Ran from the field of battle and had to swim to safety across the loch. The archbishop, James Beaton, was dragged out from his hiding place behind the high altar in Blackfriars. They would have torn him to pieces but Gavin Douglas said it was a sin to kill a bishop.”
“My husband’s uncle was there, commanding the mob?”
“He is all Douglas, and no churchman,” he says surlily.
“It was a Douglas mob?”
“It was the Red Douglases against the Hamiltons. It was a clan war in the streets of the city though one is deputy regent and the other is the representative of England.”
“But they spared Archbishop Beaton?”
“They did, and they called on all Hamiltons and their kinsmen, their affinity and their friends, to leave the city. All the Hamiltons are going now.”
“They can’t go. Edinburgh cannot be in the power of one family.”
“The gates are open and the Hamiltons are leaving. The Douglas clan holds the city. Soon, your husband will order that we open the castle gates to him.”
I see my son’s gaze turn on me. He has said nothing while the captain tells us this terrible news. I wonder what he is thinking behind that expressionless mask. I take his cold hand.
“Can we hold out?” I ask.
“Till when?” the captain says sharply. “Yes, we can hold a siege, but what if he brings in the English army against us?”
“Can’t we hold a siege until it is relieved?” I ask.
“Who is going to relieve the siege?” He asks the key question. “The deputy regent has just run away disguised as a coalman and hidden himself in the marshes of the Nor’ Loch. The regent is far away in France. You have no army and your brother is not going to send one against his own man—your husband. Who is going to save you and the king?”
I feel very cold. I put my hand on my son’s shoulder and feel that his muscles are tight as a bowstring. “Are you saying that we have to admit the Douglas clan to the castle?”
The captain bows, his expression grim. “I regret that is my advice.”
“Led by my husband?”
He nods.
I look at Davy Lyndsay. “I am not afraid,” I lie.
James sits on the throne in the presence chamber, I sit beside him as dowager queen. James Hamilton is hiding in the marshes with the coalman’s horse, we have no defense against Archibald who walks into the room, drops to his knee before James, and lifts his head to wink at me.
“I’ve returned,” is all he says.
LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1520
The council of the lords is dominated by the Clan Douglas, led by my triumphant husband, Archibald. He makes it clear that he has captured the city, and captured me. He demands that we live together as a royal family, I at his side as his wife, in his bed at night, at his right hand during the day, my son and daughter in his keeping: he is their father and head of the royal household.
I won’t surrender to him. I won’t let him take me, like the spoils of battle. I won’t allow this murderer into my bed. I won’t let him touch me. I shudder with horror at the thought of him hiding his men in my city, and calling them out for massacre. I think of the people of Edinburgh, my people, washing blood from the cobbles, and I leave Edinburgh to live alone at Linlithgow.
Once again, I am parted from my son, I have to leave him behind as a prisoner at Edinburgh Castle. Once again I have no money. Archibald has my rents, he has ownership of all my lands, and the council of lords don’t dare to complain. I don’t expect help from Lord Dacre, who is Archibald’s friend and paymaster. I don’t expect help from Harry, who commanded that I should return to this husband and said that I was lucky that he received me. I have no sisters to advise me: they don’t write. I am very alone. It is a cold, wet summer, there is much illness in the city of Edinburgh and even in the country people are terrified of plague. I don’t write to Katherine, for what will she reply? I know what she thinks, and I know why she says it. I know she cannot hear the word “divorce” without thinking that her own life as Harry’s aging barren wife is guttering away like a candle clock. But then, in midsummer, I get a package of letters from London.
The first is from my sister Mary. She writes that she was ill in spring but that she was well enough, thank God, to go with the king and queen to France. She bubbles with delight, her letter filled with misspellings and blots of excitable ink. Through the scrawl I make out that the visit was to sign a great treaty to confirm the peace between England and France, and that they made a masque every day. Harry took a hundred tents, a thousand tents, to the field outside Calais and all the nobility of England took their households and their horses and their hawks and their servants and built their own summer palaces out of canvas and wood and showed off their wealth and their joy. Harry summoned a city for a summer’s day and at the center of it a fountain flowing with wine with silver cups for anyone to drink.
Mary has thirty-three gowns, she lists her shoes, she had a cloth-of-gold canopy held over her head when she walked out in the brilliant sunshine. She rode the most beautiful horses, everyone cheered her as she went by.
I so wish you had come! You would have loved it so!
I daresay that I would. It is a long long time since anyone cheered me, or the Scots had anything to cheer about. I open a small package from Katherine.